voice, which had a sardonic tone that was new. He poured me a drink and sat down, the long overcoat draping his knees. I looked for the bulging pocket, the protruding butt, but nothing of the sort was visible under the coat. We sat drinking together. I made conversation about my travels, waiting for the girl to appear. There was no sign of her; not a sound from the rest of the house. He did not mention her, and I could tell that he refrained deliberately by his look of malicious amusement. The room I remembered as charming was now neglected, dirty. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling, there were deep cracks in the walls as from the effect of blast, black patches where rain had seeped in, and with it, the devastation outside. When my impatience became uncontrollable I asked how she was. ‘She’s dying.’ He grinned spitefully at my exclamation. ‘As we all are.’ It was his idea of a joke at my expense. I saw that he meant to prevent our meeting.
I needed to see her; it was vital. I said: ‘I’ll go now and leave you in peace. But could you give me something to eat first? I’ve had nothing since mid-day.’ He went out and in a rough overbearing voice shouted to her to bring food. The destruction outside was contagious and had infected everything, including their relationship, and the appearance of the room. She brought a tray with bread and butter, a plate of ham, and I looked closely to see if her appearance had changed too. She only looked thinner than ever, and more nearly transparent. She was completely silent, and seemed frightened, withdrawn, as she had been when I knew her first. I longed to ask questions, to talk to her alone, but was not given the chance. The man watched us all the time as he went on drinking. Alcohol made him quarrelsome; he got angry when I refused to drink any more, determined to pick a quarrel with me. I knew I ought to go, but my head ached abominably and made me reluctant to move. I kept pressing my hand over my eyes and forehead. Evidently the girl noticed this, for she left the room for a minute, came back with something in the palm of her hand, murmured: ‘An aspirin for your head.’ Like a bully, he shouted: ‘What are you whispering to him?’ Touched by her thought for me, I would have liked to do more than thank her; but his scowl was so vicious that I got up to leave.
He did not come to see me off. I felt my way through the darkness by walls and furniture, faced a pale shimmer of snow when I opened the outer door. It was so cold that I hurriedly shut myself in the car and put on the heater. Looking up from the dashboard, I heard her call softly something of which I caught only the words ‘promise’ and ‘don’t forget’. I switched on the headlights, saw her in the doorway, thin arms clasped round her chest. Her face wore its victim’s look, which was of course psychological, the result of injuries she had received in childhood; I saw it as the faintest possible hint of bruising on the extremely delicate, fine, white skin in the region of eyes and mouth. It was madly attractive to me in a certain way. I had barely caught sight of it now before the car began moving; I was automatically pressing the starter, not expecting it to work in the freezing cold. At the same moment, in what I took for an optical delusion, the black interior of the house prolonged itself into a black arm and hand, which shot out and grasped her so violently that her shocked white face cracked to pieces and she tumbled into the dark.
I could not get over the deterioration in their relationship. While she was happy I had dissociated myself, been outside the situation. Now I felt implicated, involved with her again.
TWO
I heard that the girl had left home suddenly. No one knew where she was. The husband thought she might have gone abroad. It was only a guess. He had no information. I was agitated and asked endless questions, but no concrete facts emerged. ‘I know no more than you. She simply vanished, I suppose she’s entitled to go if she wants to—she’s free, white and twenty-one.’ He adopted a facetious tone, I could not tell if he was speaking the truth. The police did not suspect foul play. There was no reason to think harm had come to her, or that she had not gone away voluntarily. She was old enough to know her own mind. People were constantly disappearing; hundreds left home and were not seen again, many of them women unhappily married. Her marriage was known to have been breaking up. Almost certainly she was better off now, and only wanted to be left in peace. Further investigation would be resented and lead to more trouble.
This was a convenient view for them, it excused them from taking action. But I did not accept it. She had been conditioned into obedience since early childhood, her independence destroyed by systematic suppression. I did not believe her capable of taking such a drastic step on her own initiative: I suspected pressure from outside. I wished I could talk to someone who knew her well, but she seemed to have had no close friends.
The husband came to town on some mysterious business, and I asked him to lunch at my club. We talked for two hours, but in the end I was none the wiser. He persistently treated the whole affair lightly, said he was glad she had gone. ‘Her neurotic behaviour nearly drove
Somehow or other I had to find her; the fact remained. I felt the same compulsive urge that had driven me straight to the country when I first arrived. There was no rational explanation, I could not account for it. It was a sort of craving that had to be satisfied.
I abandoned all my own affairs. From now on my business was to search for her. Nothing else mattered. Certain sources of possible information were still available. Hairdressers. Clerks who kept records of transport bookings. Those fringe characters. I went to the places such people frequented, stood about playing the fruit machines until I saw a chance of speaking. Money helped. So did intuition. No clue was too slender to follow up. The approaching emergency made it all the more urgent to find her quickly. I could not get her out of my head.
I had not seen all the things I remembered about her. During my first visit I was in their living-room, talking about the Indris, my favourite subject. The man listened. She went to and fro arranging flowers. On an impulse I said the pair of them resembled the lemurs, both so friendly and charming, and living together so happily here in the trees. He laughed. She looked horrified and ran out through the french window, silvery hair floating behind her, her bare legs flashing pale. The secret, shady garden, hidden away in seclusion and silence, was a pleasant cool retreat from the heat of summer. Then suddenly it was unnaturally, fearfully cold. The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes.
On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. The room was cold. There was thick frost on the window panes and snow piled up on the sill outside. He wore the long uniform coat. She was shivering. When she asked, ‘May I have a rest?’ her voice had a pathetic tremor. He frowned, looked at his watch before he put down his palette. ‘All right. That’ll do for now. You can dress.’ He untied her. The cords had left deep red angry rings on the white flesh. Her movements were slow and clumsy from cold, she fumbled awkwardly with buttons, suspenders. This seemed to annoy him. He turned away from her sharply, his face irritable. She kept glancing nervously at him, her mouth was unsteady, her hands would not stop shaking.
Another time the two were together in a cold room. As usual, he wore the long coat. It was night, freezing hard. He had a book in his hand, she was doing nothing. She looked cold and miserable, huddled up in a thick grey loden coat with a red and blue check lining. The room was silent and full of tension. It could be felt that neither of them had spoken for a long time. Outside the window, a twig snapped in the iron frost with a sound like a handclap. He dropped the book and got up to put on a record. Instantly she began to protest. ‘Oh, no! Not that awful singing, for heaven’s sake!’ He ignored her, went on with what he was doing. The turntable started revolving. It was a record I had given them from my tape recording of the lemurs’ song. To me, the extraordinary jungle music was lovely, mysterious, magical. To her it was a sort of torture, apparently. She covered her ears with her hands, winced at the high notes, looked more and more distraught. When the record ended and he re-started it without a moment’s pause, she cried out as if he had struck her, ‘No! I won’t listen to it all over again!’ threw herself at the mechanism, stopped it so abruptly that the voices expired in uncanny wailing. He faced her angrily. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Have you gone off your head?’ ‘You know I can’t stand that horrible record.’ She seemed
